A New Era for Sustainability in Clinical Research

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Theirry Escudier, Portfolio Lead, Pistoia Alliance, discussed the alliance’s newest initiative to assess the carbon footprint of clinical trials. The initiative aims to answer whether decentralized clinical trials positively or negatively impact carbon footprints. Escudier also discussed how clinical research stakeholders are slowly beginning to adopt more sustainability practices, focusing on reducing waste and costs.

ACT: In terms of sustainability, how have clinical research stakeholders been responding to challenges such as operational costs?

Escudier: Except a few, let's say, front-edge companies, that have already looked to that domain for a couple of years, I guess most of the clinical leaders have never really considered the sustainability, because I think no one has really assessed in the past, in fact, the impact of the clinical trial implementation. Everyone is focused for decades about ethics, about safety, about regulatory compliance, keeping I would say those trials within the budget, within the timelines, make sure that patients will, I would say, accept to be part of those clinical trials, having good data, good quality, so all those things with an increasing complexity of the trials, this has been proven many times by those studies from Tufts, it's clear that the protocols are becoming more and more complex. There is more and more, I would say, demand on both the investigator side and on both the patient and everyone was focused on that, and it's only in the recent days that there was a new mindset that is appearing to say also, well, clinical trials are not equal to zero in terms of carbon footprint, and because this is an overall action and implementation, can we reduce that impact that now people are also looking and a couple of comments is, is not to oppose, I would say, the sustainability versus the cost, because, if you think also in a different manner, one of the other issues in clinical trials is the waste, waste of packaging, waste of blood samples that are not used and even they are sent to the site, some waste of the drugs even now with all the IRT system, you can really more control, I would say, the number of supplies you are sending, but still, there is a lot of waste and this waste is purely, I would say, carbon footprint, but also it's a waste of money.